Hi, My client recently did a sandbox refresh and we now noticed that the images in some advanced pdf template were no longer working. I did some digging and noticed that the file urls in the sandbox account were now exactly the same as the urls in the production account, as expected, but the pdf templates code in sandbox was still pointing at the old urls (the images were uploaded to both sandbox and production since the last previous refresh, hence the different internal ids and urls). Simply replacing the urls in the source code with the file’s new urls (which now match the production account urls) solved the issue but it left me wondering, isn’t the advanced pdf code supposed to also be replaced when doing a sandbox refresh?

Yeah, pretty positive a refresh does overwrite the templates. My guess would be there's some confusion about the snapshot date/time, timing of file edits, timing of template edits, file permission changes, multiple sandboxes, or the actual order that all this happened in. Speaking from my own personal experience, it's real easy to get mixed up with the timing of changes, particularly when a sandbox refresh takes a while to get activated and you're working on things in the interim.

What's more common is developing a PDF template in sandbox with file URLs to images in the sandbox account, and then finding that the production template stops working after a refresh

my SB refresh finished yesterday but the PDF templates were not overwritten

Interesting, so that would explain what I experienced, namely that the files in the file cabinet were overwritten (and therefore had new internal IDs and URLs) but the PDF templates were still pointing at the old URLs since they were not overwritten…